"His is the cinema of the nightmare, the fable, and the morality tale." - Andrew SarrisWhen, in 1933, Joseph Goebbels offered Fritz Lang the honor of heading up the Third Reich's film industry, the famous director didn't respond, "Let's do lunch"; he lit out of the country for France that very night. Lang's close brush with the dark victory of Nazism-which he had predicted so inventively in his German films such as Spies, M, and Dr. Mabuse-haunted him all the way to America, where he settled in 1935, and where he has as good a claim as anyone to having invented the film noir genre. Lang's preoccupation with fatality, with man in continual flight from capture and death, was immediately evident in the Hollywood films; Fury, his first feature for MGM, was called at the time "M by other means." But Lang had in fact spent two years immersing himself in various American milieus; thus the lynch mob depicted in Fury; the backroads network in You Only Live Once (a film that would inspire Nick Ray and Jean-Luc Godard, among others); or Clash by Night, with its backdrop of Monterey's fishing community, all show the director totally absorbed by his adopted country, and ready to expose its new-world innocence as a collective fantasy. By his last Hollywood film, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt, all traces of Expressionist theatricality are gone, and we are left with a film-noir fatality that is far more disturbing for its deadpan inevitability.From the impassioned anti-Nazi films of the forties to the psychoanalytic crime films of the fifties, the pleasures of Lang's American movies lie in their visual construction. Lang was a filmmaker who left nothing to chance-but he had to give much to producers (a fact Godard picked up on in Contempt), and finally gave up on Hollywood altogether in 1956. Lang died in 1976, and his centennial in 1990 went virtually unmarked. Lang in the U.S.A. is part one of a two-part retrospective that continues in the fall with his German and French films. We can explore in reverse the relationship between what Andrew Sarris called "the fear and terror projected on the screen by a great cinematic spellbinder"-referring to his American films-and the stylish German films in which he "prowled in the dark corners of the soul where destiny collided with depravity."Judy Bloch Editor The Fritz Lang retrospective is cosponsored by Goethe-Institut, San Francisco, and presented in cooperation with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Special thanks to Dr. Dieta Sixt and Ian Birnie.Saturday July 7, 2001
